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The Homely Mutt

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Re: The Homely Mutt

#111

Post by dredmorbius »

borplk wrote: post #100
rbellio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my fault for not explaining why I wasn't going to look into it more. According to the features it has listed, it offers me no obvious advantages to my current tools and claims to be difficult to setup and configure. Beyond that, if you truly want adoption for a tool, you'd invest time into making sure that you remove the obstacles of someone utilizing it. This is a tool that hasn't had any major releases sinc…

As silly as it sounds I think most of these tools are just being overly appreciated by a group who (at least sub-consciously) think of themselves as cool/badass for having some hacker-style terminal in front of them, you know it's true. Hit me all you want, but the same applies to Vim and Emacs for a large percentage of people who admire these tools. People religiously defend them just because they are 20 something y…

Or, perhaps, the tools do something well, are flexible in their approach, and, by way of incremental improvements and configurations over time, fit very hand-in-glove with those who've been using them for some time.

I'd used multiple email programs before finding my way to mutt, including various GUI programs. I'd used elm and pine briefly and somewhat enjoyed them. My primary mailer prior to mutt was Netscape's built-in mail client (NN3/4). The main problems with that were instability and some lack of flexibility.

Mutt took a week or so of getting used to ... and then ... just worked.

Not having an integrated editor (e.g.: making use of vim) was a huge win. One of the huge benefits of console-mode tools is that they can make use of one another in this way.

I've used a great many email clients since encountering mutt, and none are as fast, effective, reliable, and efficient as mutt. I keep coming back.

My complaints? Search through large volumes of mail (10s to 100s of thousands of messages) is slow. Google's use of tags is really useful, and more flexible than a highly-structured set of mailboxes. There are add-ons / forks of mutt which provide both features.

There's also a lot to be said for tools which work over a minimal configuration -- 24x80 vt100 emulation over serial line (your "last ditch" remote access method for most servers), SSH, Connectbot, console, etc.

Knock them all you want. The tools are useful, ubiquitous, standard, and effective.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#112

Post by greglindahl »

dsr_ wrote: post #42
overshard wrote: post #22

This is a great post about a very finely tuned Mutt setup. I always enjoy reading about high customized environments. I am someone who would love to use Mutt but I get so much HTML only email it's sadly impossible for me to do so. (Newsletters and misc friends who think large HTML footers are cool.)

In your .muttrc: auto_view text/html alternative_order text/plain text text/html That presents plain text first if it's multiply-encoded, but makes html available. In your mailcap: text/html; /path/to/browser '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html displays HTML in a browser window for you. mutt launches this when you choose to look at the html version. But instead, your mailcap cou…

Super awesome! I use mutt on a remote server and don't want a browser involved. This recipe really does a nice job.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#113

Post by antidoh »

callahad wrote: post #93

I use a similar setup, but I've been bitten by having Mutt and OfflineIMAP accessing the same Maildir concurrently. So instead, I run a local copy of Dovecot to expose a local IMAP server that both Mutt and OfflineIMAP talk to my Maildir through. This also means that I can trivially set up things like Thunderbird or MacBiff, using the same local IMAP server. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

I do the same, run dovecot, for essentially the same reasons.

It's not Rube Goldberg, it's separation of concerns: dovecot/imap for message serving and storage, and $CLIENT for mail access and processing.

Every so often I get pissed off at my mail client, run up the black flag and start slitting mail client throats[1]. In fact this article started me off on my biannual "doesn't anything not suck" tour, this time looking at claws, alpine and mutt. Anymore though, I just don't give a meh for intricate configuration.

One thing would make me want to spend a day in feverish configuration: if mh ("ah, mh") would do imap. I loved mh back in the day, when there was virtually no interface, just a collection of command line programs. Unfortunately it's pop-only and plain text only, far as I can tell. I have this fantasy of finding the source and ...

[1] http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34585.html

Re: The Homely Mutt

#116

Post by WayneDB »

dredmorbius wrote: post #108
WayneDB wrote: post #41

"...it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." The advantages were never enumerated. Most of the article was spent teaching you how to program ^H^H^H configure the thing. What are the advantages?

A small enumeration of mutt's advantages in my experience: - It's small, fast, and light. I have a mail client that runs in a terminal window (or console session, or remote SSH session). Navigation, search, and controls are all keybindings. It's fast to fire up, compose, edit, navigate, filter, and send. - Threading. Mutt's thread-handling is second to none (though strongly influenced by newsreaders such as tin and s…

Excellent, thank you very much for that. I may actually spend the time to learn how to use mutt.
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